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Notes -
It occurred to me recently that I have no idea why Jim Crow laws existed.
I know from life experience that white flight isn't the result of racist white people wanting to avoid being near people who look different from them, but rather, reasonable people wanting to avoid black crime. I could extrapolate from this that the point of Jim Crow laws was to keep black criminals away, but that makes no sense. Black people had been enslaved for their entire time in the new world, so they didn't have the opportunity to become a criminal underclass. White people would not yet have any basis for the claim that black people are dangerous to be around, would they?
A possible solution to your quandary is that a black criminal underclass did in fact form in the intervening years between emancipation and the creation of Jim Crow laws. The black ghetto subculture that colonized Northern industrial cities during the Great Migration was not a novel development but grew out of a preexisting subculture that had existed for generations in small Southern cities dating back to emancipation.
I may be misremembering, but I believe a lot of ghettos originally grew out of the Contraband Camps set up by the Union. After Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves were 'seized' as contraband and put in camps. This became a humanitarian crisis, as disease ravaged these camps and there were shortages of food. I believe some hundred thousand+ black people died. Many former slaves returned to the south, or travelled north, after the war ended, but many stayed in these camps. It'd be interesting to overlay the historic locations of those camps with various post-war maps and see if any of them are still ghettos and/or predominantly African-American.
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